Wednesday, 27 July 2016

Alex Lo: Trump and the folly of empire (My Take, 25 July)

This time Lo picks up on yet another unhinged riff by wannabe president Donald Trump to criticize America's "imperialism, hegemony and interventionism".

Cue the usual litany of "imperialist interventions" from Vietnam to Iraq, via Palestine and South America.

But America is neither imperialist nor hegemon.

Lo must recall that America had to be dragged into both world wars. In both, its contribution was critical to our victory against fascism. The world would be a worse place had America not "intervened" on our side.

Then there's American interventions since that have been successful and life-saving: from Laos to Kosovo, to ending the Cold War and beyond. Not forgetting the post war Marshall Plan, the WTO, and America's charity: it's always the major donor in global disasters, like the Boxing Day Asian tsunami of 2004. (Help that was never acknowledged by Indonesia, by the way).

And that still leaves aside the myriad other US contributions to humankind: from first air flights to first moon landings. From television, computers, Internet, GPS and smartphones to Google and genomes. Without the country that Lo & co view as so horrid we would have none of these. And be immeasurably poorer for it.

America can be summarized in one word: Freedom. What would be the one word to summarize Russia or China?

America may never have perfected the practice of its principles, but at least they can be freely questioned, most severely perhaps by Americans themselves. Not something one could say of the other would-be Superpowers.

"...it is the duty of those who have accepted Islam to strive unceasingly to convert or subjugate those who have not. This obligation is without limit of time or space. It must continue until the whole world has either accepted the Islamic faith or submitted to the power of the Islamic state."

-- Bernard Lewis, renowned historian of Islam and the Middle East, in The Political Language of Islam, p72-3.

In other words:

"Islam is unique among religions of the world in having a developed doctrine, theology and legal system that mandates warfare against unbelievers."